


A Dinner of Herbs

by OldShrewsburyian



Series: Dangerous Ends [7]
Category: The Hour
Genre: Biblical References, Cooking, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, James Bond References, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Sharing a Bed, john donne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 13:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9748058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Late February 1958. Freddie is released from hospital. Bel makes dinner. They aren't always good at communicating with each other.





	1. Chapter 1

Bel finds herself struggling to breathe evenly. She has come to this terraced house in Notting Hill too often, under too many different circumstances, to face it calmly now. She is let in, and tries not to hurry on the stairs, and not to imagine the slow thump of Freddie’s cane on the risers. She rings the bell, and clutches the shopping, and tries to arrange her face in appropriate brightness. 

“Bel.” 

“Hullo.”

“Hullo.” He smiles, but does not move to touch her. “Come in.”

“I’ve brought dinner,” says Bel, unpacking it. “I thought we could boil the potatoes, and there’s a nice bit of fish… the peas are tinned, I’m afraid, but the wine’s quite decent.”

“What are we celebrating?”

Her hand falters on the twine binding the fish. “You.” _Us,_ she does not say. “This… or just dinner, if you like; we don’t have to be celebrating…” 

“Dinner sounds lovely. What shall I do?”

“You can scrub the potatoes; I’ll open the wine.” She opens drawers until she finds the corkscrew, chokes down the impulse to reach for the pot, to preempt his awkward progress from table to cupboard and back again. His chair and his cane scrape on the floor. She forces herself not to turn until she has finished pouring the wine. She hesitates to make a toast; the musical collision of their glasses lingers a long time in the silence.

“So,” says Bel, too brightly, “what have you been doing with yourself?”

His flickering smile seems to mock her awkwardness. “I’ve swept the house. Swept and garnished… I never liked that parable.” 

She watches him scrub potatoes, and wishes she hadn’t asked him, seeing his hands fumble stiffly in the cold water, seeing the brush elude his grasp. She filets the fish as swiftly as she can, uneasily conscious of the tearing of flesh around the bones. Miraculously, she manages that, the herbs, and the lemon all without cutting herself. 

“You know,” he says quietly, as she puts the fish into the oven, “you don’t owe me anything.”

“Owing doesn’t come into it, Freddie.” She adds, more gently: “Not between us, surely.” 

His smile is brief and unconsoled. 

“Busy days at the studio,” observes Bel, drinking her wine more quickly than it deserves. “Bertrand Russell is backing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Isaac covered their demonstration…. It’s my unenviable job to decide whether we can trust Hector with a deliberately inflammatory philosopher.”

She is grateful when the food provides them with a new subject of conversation. He is polite about the potatoes and the fish. She misses the boyish ravenousness that used to exasperate her.

“You’re settling in all right?”

“Fine. Sey was here when I got back. Helped me up the stairs, which was kind of him. There was still tea in the cupboard; more impressively, he was brave enough to drink it.”

“I’m glad—I mean, I’m glad he was here. And the new locks are all right?”

“Mm. Fine.”

“I’ve had mine done as well.” 

“Have you?” He meets her eyes. “I thought it would take an armed robbery.”

“All right.” She pretends that the ground beneath them has not shifted, that they can still tease each other like this. She does not tell him about the little paper bird, folded like a napkin on a nightclub table, resting on the back of her sofa. In the silence, the distance between them expands again.

“I suppose I’d better go,” says Bel at last. “Let you rest properly.”

“Yes. Thank you,” he adds, “for coming over. And for the dinner.”

“Of course.” She gathers her things together with her temples pounding and her throat dry. She is almost shaking with anger, that it should end like this, an evening of stilted politenesses with her closest colleague, her dearest friend, the man who has always looked at her with knowledge and with desire. She glances sideways, to find his eyes on her, dark and fixed. She stops in the act of knotting her scarf. 

“Freddie,” says Bel, “do you want me to stay?”

He shakes his head slightly; his eyes do not move from her face. “I can’t ask that of you.”

“You don’t have to ask it.”

“Bel, you—”

“You only have to say the word. Do you want me to stay?” She steps toward him. “Do you want me to stay?”

For an instant he struggles for speech, and she is afraid that he will lose his temper, or burst into tears. But then the tension in his face breaks, and he reaches out to take hold of her scarf, as if the contact were anchoring him to the earth. 

“Yes,” says Freddie, closing his eyes. “Yes.”


	2. Chapter 2

Wordlessly she puts a hand on his shoulder. Her handbag falls with a thump, his cane with a clatter, as he puts his arms about her waist.

“Shh,” murmurs Bel to the man who trembles under her hands, “shh.”

“I wanted things to be so different.”

“I know.”

“For a few hours… a few minutes… anything was possible.”

“I know.” She covers the scar on his cheekbone gently with one hand. “A fine pair of lovers we are. But neither of us is cut out to eat lotus, Freddie.”

“No.” He caresses her, almost matter-of-factly, in releasing her.

“Bel.”

“Mm.” The handbag and the cane she stows on the same chair.

“Bel, I can’t… I still can’t so much as breathe easily… I can’t…”

“It’s fine.” He lets this pass, turning off the hall light and reaching for her hand in the same movement. “It’s all right, Freddie.” 

He leaves the bedroom lamp off. This is no time for its illumination. Neatly and swiftly Bel divests herself of coat and scarf and shoes; it is only when she turns back to him that she realizes he has stopped at the third button of his shirt, his hands trembling too violently to master their appointed task. She crosses the room before he can speak. Wordlessly she covers his hands with her own, then works swiftly down the placket, unhesitating, until she draws the shirt away. 

Even in the distant glow of the street lamp, the faded bruises make a fearsome pattern, a map of murderous intent. And then there are the dark scars, inflicted by the gangster and the surgeon, intersecting below the heart. “Oh, Freddie,” says Bel. “Oh, Freddie.” His response is to move closer to her, his hands on her shoulders; to move close enough that she can no longer see the scars; to kiss one small ear, the line of her throat, the hollow of her collarbone… 

“Oh, Freddie,” breathes Bel, in quite a different tone, and takes his shorn head between her hands. He rests his weight against her; she rests her lips on the ridge of the scar that slashes across his forehead. He shivers under her hands, and she reaches around him for the pajama shirt on the chest of drawers. 

“Not very efficient, am I?” She moves with almost abrupt haste, now, twitching each button into place as if bent on occupying her whole attention with the task. “That,” says Bel, half-reproachful and half-teasing, “is very distracting.” He releases the lobe of her ear.

“I can manage the trousers,” he says. “I’ve another set if you want them. Third drawer down.” How has it come to this, she wonders—this intimacy, this strangeness? She changes quickly despite the dark, slipping on trousers under slip, shirt over camisole. Later, and soon, she promises herself, the true seeing of each other, naked and unashamed. She strips off her stockings last thing, sending them to land on top of the other clothes on the chair. When she turns, he is regarding her from the mattress.

“You’re beautiful, you know.”

Her laughter wells up, but she feels herself close to tears. “In your pajamas?”

“In my pajamas.”

She climbs under the covers; he lowers himself beside her. For some minutes they lie still in the darkness; the headlamps of a belated car reach over the ceiling.

“Moneypenny?”

“Yes, James?”

“I might—I might shout. I get nightmares.”

“It’s all right.” How many times, she wonders, will she have to tell that lie, until it becomes true? 

“I’ll wake you, shall I?”

“Please.” The word is a mere whisper. “Bel, I—”

“Don’t you dare apologize.” She turns towards him, lays one hand lightly on his chest, over the seamed scars and rapidly beating heart. “Don’t you dare.” He lets out a shuddering breath, and covers her hand with his own.

He does not shout, she discovers. He moans: it is a disturbingly unchildlike sound.

“Freddie.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Freddie.” The sound that escapes his lips might be a word: no, or don’t. Afraid to shake him, she reaches for his hand, lays it against her own heart, schooling her own breath. She is already slipping into drowsiness as his breathing slows to match hers. Released, his hand drifts to rest on her thigh. _License my roving hands,_ she thinks, suddenly awake again in the darkness. _And let them go before, behind, between…_ But he breathes heavily once more. Bel thinks of other men who have slept next to her: turned away, in careful or thoughtless remoteness; or with limbs draped possessively over her own. She cannot recall a previous touch sought thus, in unconscious tenderness. Lying next to the man who is not yet her lover, Bel falls unresisting into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Proverbs 15:17: "Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith."
> 
> The parable Freddie hates is taken from Luke 11: "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first."
> 
> The John Donne poem of which Bel is reminded (she did, after all, read English at Oxford) is "To His Mistress, Going to Bed": https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/his-mistress-going-bed


End file.
